Original (English)

INTRODUCTION Mungo Park was born on the 10th of September, 1771, the son of a farmer at Fowlshiels, near Selkirk.  After studying medicine in Edinburgh, he went out, at the age of twenty-one, assistant-surgeon in a ship bound for the East Indies.  When he came back the African Society was in want of an explorer, to take the place of Major Houghton, who had died.  Mungo Park volunteered, was accepted, and in his twenty-fourth year, on the 22nd of May, 1795, he sailed for the coasts of Se